The kind of preaching we like; the type of preacher we want

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Then Amaziah said to Amos, “Go, you seer, flee away to the land of Judah.  And there eat bread and there do your prophesying!  But no longer prophesy at Bethel, for it is a sanctuary of the king and a royal residence.” (Amos 7:12-13).

My journal from a number of years back has this:

Got a letter today from a sweet, humble (really), godly lady who criticized the preaching of our Thanksgiving guest preacher.  She said, ‘Notice what he did last Tuesday night.  He told of the 9 thankless lepers and suggested reasons why they did not give thanks. Many people left our church when he was here because of this kind of preaching.”

Our speaker had been the interim pastor before I arrived. For some 18 months he had ministered to our troubled congregation as they tried to recover from a devastating split.  He had been the essence of faithfulness.

She continued, “Our people want line upon line, precept upon precept.”

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Radio spots for your church? Here’s what we did.

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Do churches still buy radio spots?  If you do, here are a few thoughts on the subject.

In a small to medium sized town, your church can probably afford an ongoing promotion of radio spots or a regular daily program.  Not so much in a metropolitan area.

In one sense, I guess I’ve done it all (or most of it!), everything from television broadcasting of our weekly services each Sunday to making 10-second TV spots promoting those broadcasts, to having a daily morning “live” call-in program on a Christian radio station.  I’ve hosted panel discussions on television, been interviewed on other people’s programs, some of them national. Was even on Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” once.

When I pastored in Charlotte, NC, a major city with many radio stations and high costs for air time, our church came up with a budget for a series of 30-second spots which I would be recording.  Our committee did the background work and decided on three stations to run the ads.  I drove to each station and recorded the spots once a month.

Here’s what happened at one of those recording sessions.

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Why do church people hang on to their jobs too long?

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“Diotrephes who loves the preeminence…”  (3 John 9)

In one church I served, the assistant pastor had been there for over 25 years and was long past retirement age.  After I learned he was working against my leadership, when our people started talking about his retiring, I jumped on that bandwagon.  We set a date, with his complete involvement, and the congregation gave a generous love offering.  Then, just before the big day, the personnel committee informed me that they were asking him to remain in place.  He would not be retiring.

Yes, they “informed” me. They didn’t ask.

He gladly stayed on, seeing himself as the savior of the church against this young whippersnapper of a pastor.  (I was 46, not exactly a kid.)

And no, he did not return the love gift.

Why would he want to hold onto the job?  It seemed to give him a sense of prestige being a prominent leader in the city’s most storied church.  That and a dollar would have bought him a cup of coffee.

If you conclude I had more problems in that church than just the assistant pastor, you would be correct.  I ended up leaving after only three years on less than ideal terms.

What’s funny about that–sad funny, not ha-ha funny–is that two years later, I heard the new pastor was trying to get him to retire and having a time of it.  I had to smile.

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An illustration you may not wish to use in a sermon

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Coolidge Winesett was an older gentleman who lived in rural Wythe County, Virginia.  His house was old and the toilet was at the end of a long trail. I told you it was rural.

One Saturday a few years back, according to the Danville, Virginia, paper, Coolidge was sitting on the toilet when the rotten floor gave way.  He was plunged into the 15 foot deep pit which was half filled with the muck and mire (I’m bending over backwards here to keep it nice) of decades of use.  He was injured and in pain, and unable to get out.  He yelled and yelled, but because of the isolation of his place, no one heard him.  Soon he was hoarse and gave up yelling.

On Sunday, it rained.  Big rats came into the toilet along with all kinds of creepy-crawly things.

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Is there any encouragement? Then, let’s hear it.

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“This hope we have as an anchor for our souls” (Hebrews 6:19).

Richard John Neuhaus, a Christian social critic, was picked up at the Pittsburgh airport and driven to his speaking engagement.  The entire drive, his host lamented about the disintegration of the American social fabric and the absence of Christian values in our culture.  Cases in point were too numerous to mention, but the man did anyway.  On and on, he railed against every known failure of humans, particularly his favorite sins.  Finally, as they neared their destination, Neuhaus offered these words of advice:  “Friend, the times may be bad, but they are the only times we are given. Never forget, hope is a Christian virtue and despair a mortal sin.”

Hope is a virtue.  Despair a mortal sin.

If there is one group of people on the planet who should be forever hopeful and expectant, it’s the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.

If you want to see hope in the flesh, find a dedicated fisherman.  Someone asked one of those guys, “How can you stand it to stay out here in the hot sun all day without catching anything?”  The fisherman said, “Hold it–I think I feel something.”  When the line went slack, he said, “He’ll be back.”  Then, he turned to his friend and said, “What were you saying?”

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Loving the masses, one by one by one

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While a battle is raging one can see his enemy mowed down by the thousand, or the ten thousand, with great composure;  but after the battle, these scenes are distressing, and one is naturally disposed to do as much to alleviate the suffering of an enemy as a friend.  –Ulysses S. Grant, “Personal Memoirs”

“One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”  –Joseph Stalin

“I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”  –Lucy, in “Peanuts”

Pastors, young ones in particular, have to conquer this challenge or forever pay a huge price.  It’s one thing to love a crowd, but another entirely to love that quarrelsome family, the cranky old curmudgeon, the gossip in the congregation, the unwashed homeless guy who wandered into your service, and the deacon who is dead-set on making you unemployed.

God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son….  That would say to us that His love was not an abstractiont, not theoretical, and not just so much rhetoric.  Our Heavenly Father expressed His love by the supreme act of self-giving.

The radio preacher said into the night air waves, “Beloved, I love you.”  Everything inside me rebelled at such a claim.  How can he love someone he doesn’t even know?  Someone he will never see or have any dealings with?  He loves the concept of people, if he even does that.

Love is so easy to toss around, but so hard to live out.

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Go home again? We all try it from time to time.

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For two years after college, I worked as the secretary to the production manager in a cast iron pipe plant in Tarrant City, a suburb of Birmingham. I took shorthand, wrote Mr. Hooper’s letters, typed up instructions for the foundry and orders for the shipping.  I worked the teletype and emptied Mr. Hooper’s spittoon.

It was unlike anything I had ever done before or did afterward.  I loved everything about those two years.  We were young marrieds, and soon with a baby son, and in addition to working at the plant, I was beginning to pastor a small church 25 miles north of the city. Everything was new and fresh, scary and untried, and the adrenalin was always pumping.

In college, I had majored in history planning to be a teacher, so to say my theological education was lacking is the understatement of the year.  I had no idea how to prepare a sermon or to deliver it once I came up with one.  So every week I re-invented the wheel.  The sermons were pitiful, but they were sincere efforts from this eager, naïve, kid preacher. Give Unity Baptist Church of Kimberly, Alabama credit; they were patient.  For the entire 14 months I remained with them.  Smiley-face here.

They paid me 10 dollars a week.  My tithe was twelve.  In one sense, I was paying them for the privilege of pastoring.  It was money well spent.  Another smiley-face.

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Pastoring: Giving it the personal touch

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“I just called to say I love you…” –Stevie Wonder

My journal for the 1990s records something I never want to forget.

We were trying to line up 15 freezers of homemade ice cream for a church fellowship the following Sunday evening.  My assistant always had trouble getting enough freezers because he tried to do it from the pulpit.   A mass appeal like that makes it far too easy for people to ignore.

The best way to do this is by asking the people personally.

Profound, huh?

So, in order to make a point with my assistant, I made the phone calls.  In the process, I ended up making a huge discovery.  Or possibly a re-discovery.

Here is the Journal notation from a couple of days later, awkward syntax and all.

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How to read well and fast, and hopefully smart

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Or, if you don’t like the title above, try this one: How to read a 500 page book in 30 minutes! And retain 90 percent of what you read!

That’s the come-on which led some of us to pay for the Evelyn Wood speed-reading course some years back.  It was not money well spent in my judgement, although I did discover how a few people in this world manage to pull that off.  (If your experience with that course was better than mine, congratulations.)

A friend who is an editor for a Christian news service suggested that, since I’m a constant reader, I should write a blog on the subject of reading and how to do it faster and better.  As a trained editor, she tends to read critically and thus slower than she’d like.

That hit me like the time another editor asked me for an article on gluttony.  I had consumed three large meals that day.  But I thought, “Who better than me, who knows the subject so well?”  I wrote the article and it’s still circulating the globe in cyberspace.

So, I opened the laptop with that intention.  But first, I decided to put the question to my friends on Facebook.  How to read faster and more effectively.  The answers were many, some helpful and several silly.  For instance, the latter…

–Bob recommended the Jeff Foxworthy method of “reading more gooder fastly.”

–Ken suggested, “Rd onl fw ltrs, dnt dwl on evy wd.  Dnt gv u!”   Someone needs to buy Ken a vowel.

–Luther learned to cut his reading time in one-half, he says, by turning two pages at a time.

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The Irreducibles: My ten strongest sermons.

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Whether you are retired or still actively pastoring, try reducing your sermons to ten that mean the most to you.  Ten sermons that basically say everything God has laid on your heart. Quite a challenge!

Dr. Perry Hancock is the longtime executive of the Louisiana Baptist Children’s Home in Monroe.  This week, on campus to sketch the children and talk to them, I had several visits with this great friend.  I was his and Tanya’s pastor in New Orleans, so we go back a ways.

At one point, Perry said, “I’m down to ten sermons which I preach all over.”  In a different church every Sunday, many for the first time, he does not need to reinvent the wheel each week in the way of a pastor of a congregation, God bless ’em!

He added, “I do have to keep up with where I’ve preached them so I won’t repeat myself when they invite me back!”

We laughed.  I know that feeling, being retired.

How many sermons do I have, I wondered.  Of course, as with every pastor, I have a Bible full of messages preached over some 55 years of ministry.  I’ve preached through the 28 chapters of Acts at least twice and could do it again.  (The first time, when still in my 20’s, toward the end of that long year, a deacon said, “Preacher, you’re about to Acts us to death!”  I said, “The famous ACTS-murders!”).  I have informed my new wife, “Honey, I cannot repair a car or build you a back porch, but I can give you a Bible study on Ephesians right now!”  We laughed. She’d been married to a good preacher for over half a century, so she knew how that is.

Anyway, here are my “ten best sermons,” so to speak.  Or, a better way of stating it is: These messages form the heart of what God has called me to preach to His people.

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